How Did You Sleep? - Softcover

Glennon, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889842159 ISBN 13: 9780889842151

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill Inc.,Canada, 2000

Synopsis

Presents stories about madmen, paranoiacs and the allegorically burdened. Their predicaments are impossible, absurd but strangely genuine. A husband wonders if his wife has always been made of wood. A scientist suspects his left hand is plotting against him. A tourist visits a museum dedicated to his own failed romance.

About this title

Review

'Glennon, however, is an inspired and skillful writer. His rhythm is nearly flawless, and I ended up wishing he had written these as prose poems. ''Chrome'' is one story that is beautifully realized: a man awakes to find that everything has a sheen of chrome. The narrator's fascination leads him inward and away from people, towards (ironically) the almost hyper-delicious nature of the visual and sensual. Sometimes the surface of things has its compensations.'

Here's inventive writing of a very high order -- very nuanced, very droll. ... a voice I want to hear much more from as soon as possible.'

"How Did You Sleep" is highly innovative and well-wrought. It intrigues in its layered texture, it discomforts and richly rewards its reader.'

In his first collection of short stories, "How Did You Sleep?" (Porcupine's Quill, 2000), Ottawa writer Paul Glennon eschews dirty realism and thinly-veiled autobiography for clever conceits and absurdly-extended metaphors. In one story, the president of a corporation is voted out of power by his executive board, which then votes unanimously to change him into a bear. In another, a man awakes to discover that his entire world appears to him as being made of chrome. Fiction which is funny and smart, without being either cloying or disposable, is a rare commodity in Canadian literature.'

In his first collection of short stories, "How Did You Sleep?" (Porcupine's Quill, 2000), Ottawa writer Paul Glennon eschews dirty realism and thinly-veiled autobiography for clever conceits and absurdly-extended metaphors. In one story, the president of a corporation is voted out of power by his executive board, which then votes unanimously to change him into a bear. In another, a man awakes to discover that his entire world appears to him as being made of chrome. Fiction which is funny and smart, without being either cloying or disposable, is a rare commodity in Canadian literature.' -- Nathan Whitlock "Danforth Review"

Here's inventive writing of a very high order -- very nuanced, very droll. ... a voice I want to hear much more from as soon as possible.'

"How Did You Sleep" is highly innovative and well-wrought. It intrigues in its layered texture, it discomforts and richly rewards its reader.'

Glennon, however, is an inspired and skillful writer. His rhythm is nearly flawless, and I ended up wishing he had written these as prose poems. Chrome'' is one story that is beautifully realized: a man awakes to find that everything has a sheen of chrome. The narrator's fascination leads him inward and away from people, towards (ironically) the almost hyper-delicious nature of the visual and sensual. Sometimes the surface of things has its compensations.'

Paul Glennon is a rare bird. You would never guess it from his photo on the final page of this debut collection. He stands quite ordinarily under a snowy spruce tree in what could easily be Ottawa, his home since 1975. Contextually Canadianized, he squarely faces the camera, quietly earnest and unthreatening. It's a perfectly expected portrait of a fledgling Canuck writer - and perfectly misleading. This bird's song is complex, refreshingly impudent and previously unknown.

In One Hand, a man tries to piece together the final weeks of a friend's life from the scribbled notes he has left in an edition of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The friend, having by his own admission not an artistic bone in [his body, ' borrows da Vinci's technique of using left-hand, mirror-image writing, in hopes that the left-hand/right-brain neural connection might stimulate his creative side. As his left-hand notes produce involuntary palindromes, anagrams and increasingly mysterious poetry, his right-hand, analytical prose tries to make sense of the psychical Pandora's box he's opened. The final left-hand note offers two riddles that explain the friend's untimely death.

The Museum of the Decay of Our Love describes a scholar's visit to a Central American history museum. The tale hovers dreamlike between dry events and the inner sparks they ignite. The museum's inert displays, steeped in the mythology of conquest and revolution, become interior metaphors for the man's own failed ambition in love. What feels initially too schematic evolves into a subtle probing of how external things morph into symbols as they enter the mind. The award-winning title story offers a bracing and revealing reconception of avery mundane sort of domestic squabbling. Other tales amuse with their satirical quirks, or wrest attention with deft observation.

In Self-Loathing Stymies Council, we meet Mayor Nolan Plunge, a grandstanding windbag who bleats to council that self-loathing is a Nessus's shirt' he wears daily. In Chrome, we're treated to a fluid metallic world evoked with keen imagination and riveting detail.

Glennon's charms have much to do with his originality, a willingness to veer from the safer formal path. Some stories feel overly glib or disappointingly contrived, and his repeated authorial winking is sometimes too obvious. But the eccentric and penetrating psyche at work here should not be missed.'

'Here's inventive writing of a very high order -- very nuanced, very droll. ... a voice I want to hear much more from as soon as possible.'

Synopsis

Paul Glennon makes a commanding debut with a writing style that is both quirky and elusive. His stories - strange, yet funny - are about madmen, paranoiacs and the allegorically burdened. For the characters in these stories life is a board game to which we have lost, or perhaps never had, the instructions. Their predicaments are impossible, absurd but strangely genuine. A husband wonders if his wife has always been made of wood. A scientist suspects his left hand is plotting against him. A tourist visits a museum dedicated to his own failed romance. The world is trying to communicate something to these characters, but they cannot interpret it. These stories navigate an unusual course between science fiction, satire and psychology. It makes for a journey that is strange, disturbing and surreally comic.

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill Inc.,Canada
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0889842159
• ISBN 13: 9780889842151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176